By Matthew Dieterich
www.MDieterichPhoto.com
Instagram: @mattdieterichphotography
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I have been passionate about astronomy and night sky photography since 2006. Over those 12 years, I became fascinated with the most advanced telescopes in the world. During that time I found education and outreach to be an excellent medium for me to share my passion for astrophotography with the general public....

The planets around TRAPPIST-1 are being bombarded by tremendously strong stellar winds. This partially strips them of their atmospheres and poses a real threat to any potential life within the system.
Guest blog by Sharmila Kuthunur
The discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system has brought to light a new avenue for discovering Earth-like planets — and maybe even life — around otherwise unexplored ultracool dwarf stars. The existence of life around these stars, however, depends greatly on...

Not long ago, I was given the opportunity to preview and review CuriosityStream’s Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places 2. This whimsical-yet-scientifically-based adventure through the solar system and beyond took viewers along for the ride as Hawking, in his spaceship of the same name, explored Earth and its place in the cosmos — and ended on a cliffhanger.
Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places is one of Hawking’s last works; in honor of his life and legacy, CuriosityStr...

Guest blog by Ben Palmer
Life is defined by numeric order. Our days, numbered by digits; our interactions, governed by probabilities; our universe, described by calculations. Am I making a Nostradamus-style prediction? Think again! Everywhere you look, the cosmos is alive with numbers. This very second, space is expanding, stars are dying, planets are orbiting, and you and I are breathing. All of these are behaviors that can be described by thousands of equations and a googol of numbers. Are t...

By Amy Jackson
What do a princess, a teapot, a swan and a scorpion have in common? They happen to be more related than you think! Turn on your imagination and read on. My name is Amy Jackson. I am the author of a new children’s book called Cassandra and the Night Sky, written to inspire our youngest learners to go outside at night, look up and wonder.
Curiosity and wonder
Before we lived in busy cities with our sky aglow by bright lights, we lived a more primitive life en...

If you didn’t get the telescope, eyepiece, camera, or other astronomical accessory you went to sleep dreaming about on Christmas Eve, you now have another chance.
On Saturday, March 24, 2018, the Sheboygan Astronomical Society is hosting its eleventh annual Swap-n-Sell. This year’s event, like the previous ones, will take place at the Aviation Heritage Center of the Sheboygan Airport in Wisconsin from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. For those of you who own a GPS or like to use Google Maps or MapQ...

By Rich Lohman
As an amateur astronomer with my own small observatory, I know some of the conditions that make for good astronomical viewing. But until I traveled to Chile with the National Science Foundation-sponsored Astronomy in Chile Educator Ambassador Program in June of 2017, I didn’t appreciate the full extent of the planning that goes into locating and designing a high-quality observatory.
Ingredients for a world-class observatory
The Atacama Large Millimeter/ submil...

At 3:45 p.m. EST on February 6, the spaceflight company SpaceX made history by successfully launching the most powerful privately developed rocket ever built — the Falcon Heavy. (The Saturn V, which catapulted the Apollo missions to the Moon, was the most powerful rocket of all time.) At 230 feet (70 meters) tall, the Falcon Heavy is capable of ferrying a payload of nearly 141,000 pounds (64 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit. This is roughly twice the payload that any other competing roc...

Meet Marcus Cote, a 19-year-old freelance photographer with a knack for capturing captivating launch photos from Florida's Space Coast.
Guest blog by Marcus Cote
One of the hardest aspects of photography is finding inspiration. Technical know-how can be learned and mastered over time, and equipment can be acquired through hard work and short-term savings; however, finding the creative drive and motivation to turn ideas into pictures is not as easy.
I am Marcus Cote, a 19-year-old fr...

I just received this note from Karly Pitman, Executive Director of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado:
On Friday, February 16, 2018, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, will be conducting its 5000th martian day of operating on the Red Planet.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover program landed Opportunity and her twin rover, Spirit, on the martian surface in January 2004. Though a wheel failure caused Spirit to become mired in a sand trap and cease operations i...

Spoiler alert! The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy will collide in four billion years. But alas, the Sun will be a red giant and neither Earth nor the solar system will be here to witness the collision. Guest blog by Sharmila Kuthunur
It’s rare to find neighbors that don’t meet up every once in a while. So is the case with two of the largest galaxies in the Local Group — the Milky Way and Andromeda. But unlike antisocial neighbors, these two galaxies have a plan to get toge...

Guest blog by Sharmila Kuthunur.
Although the geodynamo residing in Earth’s core is critical to maintaining our protective magnetic field, the composition of the core itself seems to have little to do with the structure and alignment of the field. Earth’s rotation, on the other hand, plays a surprisingly important role.
The very existence of a magnetic field depends on there being enough energy to drive the dynamo, which in Earth’s case comes from the convection currents th...

Moonshots: 50 Years of NASA Space Exploration Seen through Hasselblad Cameras by Piers Bizony is a stunningly beautiful and insightful book that brings the story of America’s journey into space to life. And with each passing year, its message will only grow more poignant.
“Time is doing what it always does: separating us from the tangibility of events,” the introduction reads — and it’s true, especially for those who, like me, were born into a world where man had...

If one of your New Year’s resolutions this year was to get active but you’re still struggling for motivation, you’re in luck — the Virtual Running Club, in partnership with Celestron, is offering the 2018 Inaugural Moonlight Virtual 5K/10K. And the reward for completing the race is a super-cool “Super Moon” medal to commemorate the Blue, Blood, and Super Moon of January 31, 2018.
What is a virtual race? It’s a race that you can run at any time and at ...

This week, I’m at CES (the gathering formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show), which is taking place in the massive Las Vegas Convention Center.
Today was my third day, one I’ll call “the last hurrah.” It was also the final day of CES.
I headed to the convention center early because I wanted to at least stop by and see some of the manufacturers whose products Astronomy’s readers use.
First up was Canon. To this day, in excess of 90 percent of the DSLR ima...

This week, I’m at CES (the gathering formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show), which is taking place in the massive Las Vegas Convention Center.
Today was my second day, one I’ll call “return of the tourist.”
Yesterday was full of eye-opening sights, but I spent the early part of the day (before the power went out) only in the South Hall one of three giant venues side by side at the Convention Center. Today was filled with meetings in all three giant halls, but ...

Thursday morning at the AAS pulled space telescopes into the spotlight with a morning press conference highlighting the work our instruments in space have helped astronomers to complete. Keith Gendreau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center spoke about the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) aboard the International Space station, and how its data is working to provide a completely independent method for navigating deep space using the pulses received from millisecond pulsa...

I thought I was used to big conventions. After all, this summer will be my seventh trip to San Diego Comic-Con — the biggest and best pop-culture convention on the planet. More than 160,000 people attend it.
Enter a new reality. This week, I’m at CES (the gathering formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. I gotta tell you, CES is like ten Comic-Cons smashed together, shaken violently, and emptied into a venue larger than some asteroids.
Today was my first day,...

It’s Wednesday at the AAS! This morning, I got a fascinating look deeper into the nature and environment of the mysterious fast radio burst FRB121102 — the only known repeating fast radio burst to date. I also had a chance to speak with a team member working with the Thirty Meter Telescope to hear more about the challenges this project has faced, and those it has yet to overcome.
Studying an FRB and its homeFast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, are brief, bright flashes of radio energy from...

Hello from Washington D.C., the site of the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which officially kicked off Monday evening. The AAS’s winter meeting is typically very well attended, so there are plenty of people to talk to and things to see. Plus, some pretty exciting announcements about new discoveries and upcoming projects.
Monday afternoon, I had the chance to speak with Patrick McCarthy, director of the GMTO organization responsible for the Giant Magellan Telescope (...

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking! Today, the renowned physicist turns 76, and CuriosityStream is celebrating with the release of Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places 2. This followup to the Emmy Award-winning series Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places is half-documentary, half-science-fiction adventure, and one hundred percent fascinating.
I had the opportunity to preview this amazing space adventure, and it was a wild, interesting ride. Hawking begins his journey on Earth, ...

Guest blog by Sharmila Kuthunur
We take for granted Earth’s reliable magnetic field, which unceasingly protects us from calamitous radiation. Without it, life as we know it would most certainly not have been possible. Lately, however, the intensity of our magnetic field has been decreasing at an alarming rate. And given its history, a pole reversal may well be brewing deep within our planet.
Magnetic pole reversals are a relatively common occurrence on Earth, where one occurs every few t...

This June, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Chile as media liaison for the Astronomy in Chile Educator Ambassadors Program, or ACEAP. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this program represents the collaborative effort of several major organizations and observatories that you likely know about if you check our news feed regularly: Associated Universities, Inc., the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the N...

By William Zhu
A history of space sailing
You cannot exactly describe Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer born in the year 1571, as a handsome man. His premature birth contributed to his sickly childhood and smallpox weakened his vision. Yet he was a visionary. Mathematics set him free from his restrictive physical conditions to model and explain the universe. When his Italian colleague Galileo first published news of his discoveries of jovian moons using his telescope, Kepler responded ent...

I just received a new book that I think will appeal to beginners who want to observe the sky.
100 Things to See in the Night Sky by Dean Regas (222 pp., softcover, Adams Media, New York, 2017, ISBN 978–1–5072–0505–1) is an easy-to-understand book that will serve as a great first guide to the heavens.
Regas has been the astronomer for the Cincinnati Observatory since 2000, and the cohost of the syndicated astronomy program Star Gazers since 2010. He’s w...

The Eclipse Megamovie Project, a first-of-its-kind citizen science effort that brought together thousands of volunteers across the United States to capture the August 2017 total solar eclipse, received over 60,000 images! We've been pouring through them and thinking about all the different ways we can take this project to the next level.
As a result, we've launched two new opportunities for the public to get involved in our on-going scientific investigation. These brand new online citizen scien...

Which meteor showers in the upcoming year are worth viewing? We’ve created a guide to help you decide.
Glowing pieces of galactic material falling into Earth’s atmosphere can be a sight to see for those making strategic astronomical observations, or those just hoping to wish on a shooting star. If you’re lucky, you might catch sight of a meteor on a whim, as they can occur at any time, but keeping an eye on the celestial calendar could save you from observing ordinary ...

Small-scale astronomers had recognized her work for quite some time, but it took many years for Hisako Koyama’s name to become renowned in the profession science community. A recently published paper outlines how her work impacted the documentation of sunspots over the last century.
Koyama’s name lingered in the back of Delores Knipp’s mind for years before she decided to conduct a detailed study on her work, outlined in the American Geophysical Union journal, Space Weather....

Guest blog by Amber Jorgenson
If you check your celestial calendar, you’ll notice a pretty stellar galactic event is coming up this weekend. The only supermoon of 2017 is scheduled to descend upon the sky on Sunday, December 3. Though they have been non-existent in 2017 thus far, two more supermoons are set to follow in January 2018. With the surge of supermoons in the coming months, people may be wondering what’s so super about them anyway, and if they’re worth keeping an e...

I’ve had the opportunity to review several CuriosityStream series in the past; each one has been engaging, fun, and left me wanting more. Some are straightforward documentaries, exploring what we do — and don’t — know about our universe. And some are more playful adventures, imagining what it’s like to stand on a distant planet or what the solar system’s giant planets would look like hanging in our sky.
Currently offering more than 1,500 documentaries on de...